Micro-Places

Definition

Micro-places is Per Gunnar Røe's coinage for the sub-neighbourhood scale at which place attachment actually forms in large planned housing areas. The definition arises from an empirical refusal: in Skjettenbyen, "Some of the respondents… expressed the view that this belonging was not associated with the housing area as a whole (it is too big), but to what we might choose to call 'micro-places', or groups of neighbours sharing a common interest or cultural disposition, or living close to each other" (Røe 2015, p. 548). The concept has a material correlate in the plan: "These relations, and the formation of local place-based social capital, were often associated with the interior road systems and 'micro-places' of the area" (p. 547) — Emma's small road of five families who "have become very close, and we help each other," water each other's flowers, take in the mail, and "know each other's kids, and grandchildren" — "So we have become friends even if in the beginning we were just neighbours" (p. 547).

The concept carries three further specifications. (1) Temporality: micro-place attachment is "the mature sense of place that develops over time when people build social capital and 'collect' biographic memories" (p. 547) — it cannot be delivered at opening day. (2) Conflict-sensitivity: "This process of place-making may be amplified if there is 'trouble' in the neighbourhood, or if there are threats (like development plans and road building) or needs (for a new school, perhaps) which may lead to social mobilization" (p. 548) — Emma's delayed school and shop threw people together. (3) Biography: "For others, those who have been raised in Skjettenbyen, such social (biographical) capital may be reconstructed from the time they lived there" (p. 548) — micro-places persist in the raised-in resident as reconstructable capital. The concept is thus the wiki's scale-correction to both community-nostalgia (belonging to "the area") and place-attachment abstraction: belonging is micro because sociality is micro, even inside a planning ideology that addressed the whole.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Røe ingest.

Key Thinkers

• Per Gunnar Røe — the concept's author: the "too big" refusal, the interior-road-system correlate, the trouble/threat/need amplifier, and the biographical reconstruction (2015).
• (Contrast within the wiki: Jane Jacobs — the street-level sociality of the sidewalk ballet, the closest precedent for designing for micro-scale neighbourliness; Michel de Certeau — the practiced place, of which the micro-place is a settled, residential case.)

Related Concepts

• social-capital — the concept's mechanism: micro-places are where strong ties (mutual help, keys and flowers) and weak ties ("people I stop and talk with in the shop") accumulate into place-based capital.
• elective-belonging — the concept's counter-mode: where belonging is elected through cultural capital, it attaches to design and ideology; where it grows through residence, it attaches to micro-places.
• practiced-place — the theoretical parent: the micro-place as a practiced place stabilized by repetition — the same practice, fixed in a small road over decades.
• home — the affective yield: "to be able to pop into a neighbour" as one of the stated reasons for staying — home extended to the road's reach.
• suburbanism — the cluster the concept serves: the interior scale of suburban social life, below the region and above the household.
• taet-lav — the design discourse whose interior road systems and interaction-across-pedestrian-tracks layout give micro-places their material form.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the concept's founding source: the coinage (p. 548), the interior road systems and social capital (p. 547), Emma's five-families testimony and the weak-ties supplement (p. 547), the trouble/threat/need amplification and biographical capital (p. 548), and the temporal formula — the "mature sense of place that develops over time when people build social capital and 'collect' biographic memories" (p. 547).
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the street- and green-scale instruments: the cul-de-sac's "small 'territorials'" — the household focused "primarily on their immediate group of neighbors" with "no reason to circulate to the next cul-de-sac" (p. 67) — as the street typology's micro-place formation and its connectivity cost; the eyebrow street as the designed compromise ("connect the row of houses to the greater circulation system and community, but provide a measure of privacy and territory as well," p. 67); the commons and greens as the neighborhood's gathering scale (New England commons mowed "through various informal neighborhood cooperative efforts," p. 73; Nash's Regent's Park crescent distributing park views, p. 73; Bentley Ridge's "villages" of ~50 homes each with a usable common green, p. 214); and the entry stoop/court as the house-scale micro-place ("even a small affordable home should have a 5 ft wide by 4 ft deep entry stoop," p. 84). Where Røe found attachment forming in micro-places despite the plan, Wentling specifies the micro-places production housing can deliberately provide (see cul-de-sac, social-capital, place-identity).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• What is the scale threshold of a micro-place — the small road (five families), the cluster, the courtyard? Is the concept a unit of design (Røe's road system suggests yes) or only a unit of analysis discovered after the fact?
• Does the micro-place concept generalize beyond the planned welfare-state suburb — to the post-suburban private estate, the tower neighbourhood, the village? Is "it is too big" a fact about Skjettenbyen (1,650 dwellings) or about all attachment?
• Røe's amplification thesis makes conflict generative ("trouble… created a feeling of community"). Can design plan for trouble — and does mobilization over threats (nimbyism's register) build the same capital as mutual aid?
• How do micro-places relate to Jacobs's street ballet: is the tæt-lav interior road a realized "sidewalk ballet," or does its traffic separation (cars at the edges) change the species of sociality?